On Wed, Mar 30, 2005 at 08:39:52PM +0900, Tim Sutherland wrote:
> By the end of 2005, Matz thinks/hopes the OFFICIAL Ruby implementation will
> use YARV instead of the current interpreter.
> 
> What would the result of this be?
>   - Ruby code runs faster. More often we can write the 'cleanest' code
>     instead of having to make compromises in order to get better performance.
> 
>   - People who work on the Ruby implementation have a fairly large chunk of
>     code they'll need to understand.

But perhaps also:

- The Ruby source code will be bigger and slower to build
- Scripts will be slower to start up
- Ruby applications may be less reliable initially and/or harder to debug
- Ruby may run on fewer platforms [especially if the VM writes machine-code
  directly, or has dependencies on external C compilers, linkers etc]

One of the big advantages of Ruby for me is that it's one-third of the size
of Perl, whilst still being much more feature-complete (e.g. I get OpenSSL,
MD5 and base64 encoding without having to install additional libraries)

Not that I'm saying it's a bad idea... I'm just saying it's not necessarily
going to be better for everyone :-)

Regards,

Brian.